As more companies start leveraging the respective strengths of multiple cloud environments, they must not neglect effectively managing these platforms to ensure both cost and application control. In fact, orchestrating the multicloud is a key business driver at a time where much of the focus is on digital transformation.
With resilience, orchestration and the ability to spread risk across several providers becoming invaluable, having access to tools that drive multicloud management in an agnostic manner delivers true high availability that ensures business continuity despite external conditions. If the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted anything, it is the need for companies to be agile in adapting to market uncertainties and rapidly transitioning to new environments when required.
Having access to an effective orchestration solution to enable this means businesses can seamlessly switch between on-premises and cloud environments with zero impact to performance and operations. A company can therefore run both environments in sync and have the freedom to choose which side becomes active and which is passive.
A multicloud world
Gartner believes the distributed cloud is one of the most significant trends that will influence business in the coming months. It enables flexibility in the company’s physical location, while also reducing latency and shifting the burden of support to the cloud service provider.
This means the future is looking decidedly bright for the multicloud. Local companies have started to invest heavily into platform as a service, while there is a big drive for hyper-scale providers to deliver more innovative services to the market.
Of course, much of this is reliant on the application architecture for customers who are increasingly looking at moving everything into a more public multicloud strategy. Yes, there will be a few instances where organisations will want to maintain their own environment, but they will likely leverage the multicloud for the likes of disaster recovery and business continuity.
Delivering on strategy
With the multicloud delivering multiple deployments from different vendors, orchestration fulfils a key component to tie everything together. But this requires a considered strategic response that extends beyond pure technology. It must align with the business needs as much as it integrates the systems and data.
Therefore, working with the right partner that provides a cross-cloud perspective is essential. Such a partner will provide the organisation with multiple hyper-scale options and can orchestrate technology and commercial scenarios that highlight the benefits of implementing the optimal solution. Moreover, it is better to work with a partner that provides an agnostic view and is not dependent on a specific environment such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.
Moving on-premises workloads seamlessly into the cloud and ensuring proper high availability and disaster recovery allows businesses to reduce their risk profile and start their journey to the cloud effortlessly. This will also help facilitate the implementation of agnostic tools to help future-proof the infrastructure.
Of course, not all multicloud solutions fit a particular budget and it is ultimately the budget that drives the solution. With companies across industry sectors under significant financial strain, the right partner is required, one that can deliver technology compliance, have access to an agnostic platform, and can align the strategy to meet the budget.
Built on success
A successful multicloud orchestration strategy therefore requires the right tool and the right partner.
Firstly, an agnostic tool helps manage the organisational infrastructure requirements through a ‘single pane of glass’. Not every application and process can work in a multicloud environment. Having the right tool to manage this complex environment becomes a game-changer.
Secondly, a trusted partner that can advise the business is critical. They need to assist the organisation to successfully deploy a multicloud strategy and maintain it to ensure business stability and resilience.
The multicloud is here to stay. How the business leverages its advantages effectively will determine the difference between success or failure.
